more from Reich

From this link again: http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_reich.html

Character armour then, in Reich's terms, is the sum total of our defences against external threats and internal excitation or distress. It stays with us in later life, and limits our freedom of expression, the depth of our emotional responses and our feelings of aliveness. Reich would say it arises as a response to fear and threatening situations, as well as from frustration of our primary needs - the latter being for healthy, warm physical and emotional contact. It is both psychic and somatic. He said "functional identity means nothing more than muscular attitudes and character attitudes have the same function in the psychic mechanism: they replace one another and can be influenced by one another. Basically they cannot be separated … tensions are not the "results", "causes", "accompanying manifestations" of "psychic processes"; they are simply these phenomena themselves in the somatic realm". The unity of psyche and soma is expressed in the diagram on the cover of all his books — two arrows curling in to meet each other, both expressions of an underlying energetic process.